Honestly there is no reason for the Apple TV to exist. It ia a terrible product. I have a Macbook Pro, Watch and iPhone and a Mibox. Perfect combo, even with Airplay / Casting from my phone. Miles ahead of anything Apple has created, from a usability perspective, content, just about everything.
Apple plans to launch a new version of the Apple TV in the second half of 2022, according to well-known analyst Ming-Chi Kuo.
In a tweet today, Kuo said the new Apple TV will have an improved cost structure, suggesting that the device could have a lower price that is more competitive with other streaming media players like Google's Chromecast line, Amazon's Fire TV line, and the Roku line.
Released in April 2021, the current Apple TV 4K model is priced at $179 with 32GB of storage and at $199 with 64GB of storage, while the previous-generation Apple TV HD remains available for $149 with 32GB of storage. By comparison, there are Chromecast and Roku streaming sticks available for under $50, and many other options under $100.
Both the second-generation (2010) and third-generation (2012) models of the Apple TV were priced at $99 at launch, and Apple eventually lowered the price of the third-generation model to $69, so there is precedence for a sub-$100 Apple TV.
Apple TV+ is already available on platforms like Fire TV and Roku, but a more competitively priced Apple TV model could still spur sales of the device and help to draw more subscribers to the streaming service, which competes with the likes of Netflix and Disney+.
The second-generation Apple TV 4K was the first new Apple TV generation in over three and a half years when it was released last April, with key new features including a redesigned Siri Remote, a faster A12 Bionic chip, HDMI 2.1, and Wi-Fi 6.
Article Link: Kuo: New Apple TV to Launch in Second Half of 2022, Lower Price Possible
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Kuo: New Apple TV to Launch in Second Half of 2022, Lower Price Possible
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Love my Apple TV, but this guy Koh has been saying the exact same thing for the last few years now. I remember when he was predicting an Apple TV stick. I'll believe it when I see it. Especially a pride matching the Fire TV stick! That's cloud cuckoo thinking as this IS Apple.
Also Apple: have got our Apple TV app on all the man streaming platforms such as Fire TV and Android TV, to help ensure the success of our shows.
Our ideas pair well.
I’m surprised Apple has not touted the “use your iPhone/iPad as a remote for AppleTV because it just works” as a feature or as a base to reduce costs for a unit without.
I find the cost to be a non issue in our house.
1. 77-inch OLED TV + 5.1 sound system was $7700. Who cares about the cost of Apple TV box?
2. 65-inch OLED TV + SONOS ARC was $2500. Who cares about the cost of Apple TV box?
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That is a great point. I think no included remote could be the primary cost reduction in a budget ATV.
One product only, Apple choice in their media businesses. Apple does a good job with multiple product offerings, except smart speakers or streaming. A streaming stick, works well for a good number of applications. Any TV hanging on a wall for example. My wall Mounted TV’s need furniture under them to hold the Apple TV. The attaching of the oversized box to the back of the TV convoluted. Maybe!
This gives their Service exposure to a huge segment of the market that can only be reached by selling hardware at a loss - something Apple isn’t going to do. Best of both world’s situation for them.
I’m obviously missing the point here somewhere, but I’m pretty sure my AppleTVs don’t depend on a computer.
Can you help me out with an explanation of what you mean here and whether/how an AppleTV would run the Netflix/HBO Max/Disney+/ apps without local storage?
Honestly, I would like to see Apple make an AirPlay only device (Y'know, something similar like the older Chromecasts)
I'm surprised Apple hasn't made something like that yet.
I'm surprised Apple hasn't made something like that yet.
HobeSoundDarryl
macrumors G5
I shared that perhaps it has a RAM buffer which can be considerably smaller than 32GB or 64GB. Apps run on the "home sharing" computer from which your own home movies, photos, music collection, video rips, etc may stream. The output of the apps- the video you can see- streams into the RAM buffer and is fed out of an HDMI port to the TV... exactly as maybe a home movie streams over now from a Mac or Windows computer to which an AppleTV can be linked via home sharing (organized in iTunes or TV+Music apps).
Perhaps you don't use home sharing at all? If so, I encourage you to look into it if you store your photos/music/home movies/ripped discs/etc on a computer in your home. It adds a lot of "free" very nice functionality to an AppleTV. It makes the orange Computers app become a very useful app (second most used app in my household behind the incredible Channels app).
I'll presume you are perhaps entirely using it as a streaming box only and/or maybe airplaying from an iDevice. If so, a streaming box with a RAM buffer would work the same as it does now except the apps feeding it a stream might be stored "in the cloud" instead of in 32GB or 64GB on your device. Airplaying would work as it does now, tossing the airplay stream into the device's RAM buffer to display on the TV.
More simply: this device shouldn't need even 32GB. It really needs only enough of a buffer to reasonably stream whatever one wants to watch or do on it without freezing (for more stream transfer). I don't know the amount but I'm guessing even 8GB RAM would be more than enough.
Then if someone wanted to own ALL of the apps that can be downloaded for AppleTV, they would have storage for them on the "home sharing" master computer in the home or in a virtual AppleTV storage in iCloud, each streamed down to it when you want to watch HBO or play some game or listen to Pandora or see some things on YouTube.
User experience could likely be the same... but the box itself could be simplified and thus have less cost so that it could have a lower price.
FYI: I'm generally anti-cloud myself but I've always thought the local storage options should be replaced by "back at the computer" unlimited* storage, streaming over the app or media when demanded. Half of the price of an AppleTV can buy 5TB of this hypothetical "cheaper" AppleTV app and media storage back on the home share computer.
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Lucky you don’t have a Roku that goes into a buffer overflow and needs rebooting every 48 hours.
And Airplay runs like a dog on Roku.
IMHO Apple needs to push the "video and audio quality" angle harder. (Of course that requires them to stop making mistakes in this space, like the on-going Atmos issues...)
Of course some content comes out as 4K HDR 120Hz Atmos, and that's great. But there is a ton of content that's older and lesser quality in various ways, all the way down to like 70s NTSC material.
TV's compete in their "AI" chips to improve the visual quality of this stuff, and Apple should do the same thing and do it better.
To be more precise Apple does some of this right now.
- Their Display Pipe tries to add contrast and dynamic range to SDR content and does it well, better than my LG CX
- Their Display Pipe tries to do AI-based upscaling and does it "adequately". Better than a dumb scaler, not as well as LG.
- Their Display Pipe *appears* to be based purely on one-frame at a time, no frame-to-frame data propagation. This limits how much they can improve frame n+1 based on features of frame n; and means they are terrible in terms of temporal interpolation/motion smoothing compared to my LG.
Basically what aTV HW should be able to do is take any video stream (even something like a low quality 480i DVD stream) and do a good job of
- adding HDR (contrast, color)
- intelligent upscaling all the way to 4K
- remove interlace artifacts
- temporally resample to 120Hz
- (and the same sweetening and improvements applied to audio)
to send that stream to the TV.
Yes, yes, yes we all know that you're a movie snob who only watches The Criterion Collection on your TV is "Cinema Mode" and is happy to rant for hours about the violation of human rights that occurs when a TV "modifies the film maker's intent" by performing any of these sorts of manipulations. Whatever. The rest of us just want to watch our random content, whether it's 80's sitcoms, old DVDs, or PAL documentaries, at what looks to use like the best possible quality.
This is a space where Apple (in theory) can compete and Roku et al can not. The intelligence is built into the Apple chips (the Display Pipe has been doing these sorts of things for the past 7 years or so) but
(a) Apple doesn't push this angle in product design. The aTV seems to get this stuff essentially because it's there, not because anyone on the team is looking at the HW and saying "OK, this is a great chip with this functionality; now how can we push it even harder than the phone and laptop guys are pushing it for the purposes of improving low quality video/audio"
(b) Apple doesn't push this angle in marketing. One of the pillars of the first aWatch ads was "this is just a better watch! It's atomic clock accurate, it gives easy functionality for things like alarms, it automatically handles time zones and daylight savings". Apple aTV ads should do the same thing. "This is just a better TV device. It makes all your content, even the old stuff, look better".
(c) One whole track of Apple SoC display quality has to do with automatically tracking the brightness and whitepoint of the environment and modifying the display accordingly. (The brand name for this is True Tone; a variant is the Night Shift stuff if you are one of those people who wants to remove blue from what you see when reading late at night.) aTV makes ZERO use of this.
One could imagine having the aTV with a built in sensor for brightness and white point (and perhaps a small separate wireless sensor for people who like to put their aTV in a drawer or behind their TV). Then your TV would automatically shift its brightness and color to match sunlight in the room vs night (but lights on) vs night and lights off.
It's fine to play up the aTV+ angle, but
- many people just aren't interested in the sensibility of aTV+. Very little of it interest me, for example
- aTV+ is not a great scheme for selling aTVs since it is available elsewhere!
aTV is both HW and a UI experience. Apple sells it purely as the UI experience.
They ought to be selling it more as the HW (which is a LOT harder to replicate...)
Better in which way? The only thing better about the Roku is the price. The Apple TV, especially if you're in the Apple ecosystem is better in every way.
Like a lot of what Apple does, their strategy for upcoming products is often out in the open, if you know where to look.
The TV app is its own parallel tvOS. If you used your Apple TV for nothing other than streaming services, you'd never have to leave the TV app to go into the apps part of tvOS.
An Apple TV HDMI stick that runs the TV app and nothing else, would enable users to watch their favourite streaming services within the TV app. I like the idea of channels but the most important streaming services haven't adopted it. Netflix and Disney+ would need to be accommodated as a different type of "channel" with their own UI coming up when launching them inside of the TV app.
I could see this Apple TV stick not even coming with a remote. Works with any iOS device as the remote or as an AirPlay stick from iOS and macOS. Remote sold separately if you want it.
The TV app is its own parallel tvOS. If you used your Apple TV for nothing other than streaming services, you'd never have to leave the TV app to go into the apps part of tvOS.
An Apple TV HDMI stick that runs the TV app and nothing else, would enable users to watch their favourite streaming services within the TV app. I like the idea of channels but the most important streaming services haven't adopted it. Netflix and Disney+ would need to be accommodated as a different type of "channel" with their own UI coming up when launching them inside of the TV app.
I could see this Apple TV stick not even coming with a remote. Works with any iOS device as the remote or as an AirPlay stick from iOS and macOS. Remote sold separately if you want it.
aTV (HW)
TV (app) and
aTV+ (content service)
are three different things
I'm not going to justify the (frankly idiotic) branding/naming. But people are talking about the HW here; you are complaining about the app.
(Justified complaints, but you can just never use TV.app -- I never do; I live in 3rd party apps.)
I don’t use home sharing at all since my internet became fast enough to stream music in real time. Sometimes I use airplay rather than trying to search YouTube, or whatever, on the AppleTV.
Yes, it’s entirely a streaming box, other than music, perhaps, with some airplay. It sounds like you’re proposing that AppleTV “apps” become, essentially, shortcuts to websites for the streaming providers. Not exactly, but the “apps in the cloud” sounds pretty close to running, say, Netflix in a browser.
Yeah, my parents, among others, don’t have a “home sharing master computer.” They have an AppleTV they expect to work at least as well as their fire tv.
HobeSoundDarryl
macrumors G5
As long as the user is capable of running power, and maybe Ethernet, inside the wall and willing to change the input on the TV to get to the AppleTV, that could be pretty slick.
It would be good for Apple to provide a cheaper entry level device for streaming. It would help hook more people into the Apple TV ecosystem.
The first thing they should do is move to a lower powered chip, like the S5 chip in the HomePod mini. They can only ever go so low (in terms of price) with a A series chip.
I almost wouldn't care about the price if the new hardware addressed the longstanding ATV4Kv2 issues:
- Lack of hi-res lossless support
- Netflix+Atmos random/sporadic dropout issue
- Gapless playback unsupported on Spatial Audio/Atmos music through Apple Music
- Related, but not identical, is the truncation of the first second or so of music for Spatial/Atmos music because most receivers take a second to recognize the Atmos signal for decoding. Inputting a blank second or so of just the Atmos signal prior to the start of initial track playback would solve this, but they still need to also implement gapless playback for all those tracks that are supposed to run seamless from one to the next